Machine to Machine (M2M) refers to all of the techniques and approaches to create connections between machines. The research of application scenarios of M2M communications shows that the supply of M2M communications to a mobile network has a potential market outlook. However, the M2M services put forward many new requirements to a system. In order to improve the competitiveness of mobile networks in this respect, it is necessary to optimize existing mobile networks so as to support the M2M communications more effectively.
Existing mobile networks are mainly designed for the Man to Man communications, without sufficient optimizations of Machine to Machine or Man to Machine communications. In addition, The key to success of the deployment of the M2M communication is how operating companies can provide M2M communication services at low cost.
Based on the above case, it is necessary to research how mobile networks support the M2M communications; the solution should use existing mobile networks as much as possible, such that the influence to the mobile networks by the M2M communications and the complexity of operation and maintenance could be reduced to the greatest extent.
In order to take use of resources of mobile networks effectively, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes a Machine Type Communication (MTC), that is, communication services of Machine to Machine or Machine to Man, of which the scope of service exceeds the communication of Human to Human (H2H) far and away, which differs significantly from the current H2H communications in access control, charging, security, QoS (Quality of Service), service mode, etc.
The structure of a 3GPP Evolved Packet System (EPS) is as shown as in FIG. 1. The EPS includes a radio access network and a core network, wherein the EPS is such as E-UTRAN, UTRAN, GERAN, and the core network is, for example, an Evolved Packet Core (EPC) network which includes network elements such as Mobility Management Entity (MME), Serving Gateway (S-GW), and Packet Data Network (PDN) Gateway (P-GW), a GPRS core network which includes network elements such as a Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN) and a Home Subscriber Server (HSS), an E-UTRAN which includes an evolved Node B (eNB), a service network which includes Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) that is responsible for controlling the Policy and Charging Enhanced Function (PCEF) located in P-GW or Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN) to implement the detention, gating and QoS control of Service Data Flow (SDF). A Policy Control and Charging (PCC) subsystem located between a service control layer and a access/support layer is responsible for the resource admission control and the service policy control of the whole system. The system architecture of PCC is as shown in FIG. 2, the PCRF is connected to Subscription Profile Repository (SPR) via a Sp interface, to AF via a Rx interface, to OCS via a Sy interface, to BBERF via a Gxx interface, to TDF via a Sd interface, to PCEF in the gateway via a Gx interface, to OFCS via a Gz interface.
As MTC devices are arranged in areas with high-risk in general, the possibility of damage or theft of communication modules might be high. This requires that the network side is able to detect abnormal events relative to MTC devices and adopt corresponding processing measures, such as limiting the access of MTC devices to the network, which is called MTC monitoring.
The MTC monitoring includes a plurality of aspects: event and processing configuration, event detection, event report, wherein the event and processing configuration is for setting the events to be monitored and processing activities after the discovery of events, the event detention is for detecting pre-set events by the network side, and the event report is for sending the detected event information to a MTC server.
At present, there is no solution to solve the problems such as how the network side reports a detected MTC device event to a MTC server when the network has detected a MTC device event and how the network side deals with such a event when the user equipment (UE) where such a event occurs returns to normal.